Last week there were a number of
places I should have been at, people I should have seen, conversations I should
have had, and hands I should have held. It wasn’t a good week for me, and possibly, for others too. It was a week of poignancy and pain as well as some goodness. Last week was graduation week at the University of
Salford. As long standing readers of this blog will know, when I was Head of School and
then latterly a Dean, Graduation Day was both my nemesis and one of
my greatest pleasures each year. It was always great to celebrate the success of our
students, meet their family’s and wish them well on the next stage of their life
journey.
This was me some 39 years ago (ringed
in yellow) ‘graduating’ as a qualified nurse in Swansea. I was so proud to have
survived the course, which unlike today, was not a graduate level programme.
The ceremony back then was a very different affair from the graduation
ceremonies that I have been part of over the last 11 years. I love being on the
stage and the little boy in me likes dressing up. The pomp and tradition, the
seriousness and celebration were tangible acknowledgements of the achievement every person gaining their degree has made. What I dreaded about the day was
trying to pronounce the names of some of our students. I just found it so
difficult to get my tongue around some of the pronunciations, despite hours of
practice.
However, despite my tendency to
mangle some people’s names, it always felt like a real honour to present the
names of the students as they each received their award. My
current role in the University has taken me away from this, and it is
something I have really missed. Last year I had a kind of ‘walk on part’. As a
member of the University Council I was asked to talk about the work of the Council
and the Councils contribution to the future development of the University. It
wasn’t quite the same. And this year I didn’t get to be part of any of the ceremonies
at all.
Being part of celebration of the students success was a wonderful experience to share. But I guess inevitably, it was those students who I
had the closest and most sustained relationship with that made my heart beat with
pride for them at graduation. Most often these were my PhD students. This year 2
students, Duaa and Seham, both from Saudi Arabia, completed and were able to
graduate. They had their struggles over their time with the University, but
both eventually did very well. Seham, whose work looked at the stigmatising views
and attitudes of mental health professionals held against the very people they
should be caring for, was both courageous and powerful. She has already gained
an influential position back in Saudi, and I am very confident that she will
make a difference to their future mental health care services.
Due to poor timing, another of my
students Ibrahim, also from Saudi, had his PhD viva last week, and got through with
just minor corrections to attend to. I missed the viva and being there with
him, a role carried out so well by my co-supervisor Celia. Ibrahim's work looked
at the impact of total quality management approaches to the improvement of
health services in Saudi. Again it was a very interesting piece of work that revealed
the difficulties that many health service systems have in both
measuring and improving the quality of care provided.
In the UK it is the Care Quality
Commission (CQC) who are charged with both measuring the quality of care provided and
recognising where services are outstanding or simply unacceptable. To me, the
CQC have an almost impossible task, and arguably whilst some poor practices are
picked up and addressed, the approach remains imprecise and challenged by the
human element of the assessors. They are not my favourite group of people, and
I say that from the qualified position of being on both sides of the quality assurance
table.
I was reminded of this last week
as my brother-in-law David became a patient at a local hospital – North Manchester
General Hospital. In 2016, the CQC judged this hospital overall to be ‘inadequate’.
This was a damming judgement of the services provided, see here for the full report. The reports ‘inadequate’ outcome prompted a neighbouring and ‘outstanding’ NHS Trust to take responsibility for bringing about improvement. The work is
ongoing. One of the things I think the CQC often gets wrong, is that they miss the individual
experience of patients. David’s care was exemplary. It was provided by knowledgeable
health care professionals, who demonstrated their care in the most
compassionate of ways. Yes there were issues (noise at night; ward transfers
and so on) but overall he was treated as I would want to be treated.
Sadly, after just a week of
receiving treatment, David died in the early hours of Friday morning. I wasn’t there,
but his wife and son were. They were treated with respect and dignity and when
W got there shortly after his death, the nurses made the time to support and
comfort the family. David was a larger than life man – in all senses of the word.
He looked after his 2 sisters (Glenda and W) all his life, and his son and 2 grandchildren
were the apple of his eye. The love of his life was his wife Jenny, someone he would have done anything for. David will be very much missed, and although his
sudden and unexpected death is a great shock, I am glad at the end of his life
he didn’t suffer, and proud that that the care he received from the NHS was absolutely outstanding.
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